this old largo

I did. I did used to go to The Largo, one time. With my fake id, after I Heart Huckabees came out and I read about Jon Brion in a magazine or newspaper. I used to do all kinds of things in that neighborhood that only gain in significance as everything around me changes, including the look in my eyes.

gatorade commercial

rick steves

fashion

written and directed by joshua turek for siobhan denham

san seabass

hillcrest

the old man rose from his chair got halfway across the room then forgot why he had. "oh well, guess i don't need it then."

nearby, his son thought about how when our memories abandon us, at least we still have the strength of character to forget about it.

the festival of music

I first went to Paris 6 years ago. I had been paid $4,500 for a screenplay option and I felt incredibly rich. Before then I had always told myself I'd be a cliche and go write in Paris with my first writing check, and I lived up to this very pleasurable promise. It was a magic time where I met magic French kids who danced with me and took me to parties in empty apartments and festive bars as music played on every street corner during the Festival of Music. I remember reading an email from my dad that he had gone to a Dodgers game and witnessed a brawl, he was checking in on me and laughing about some youtube videos I had made about a disgruntled German boy who only notices the industrial elements beneath the Eiffel Tower. This was months before my dad told us he had the pancreatic cancer which two long years later would claim his life. It was a few years before my mom was diagnosed with the breast cancer that she would kick at a heavy cost on an island away from home. My girlfriend and I have been here in Paris for six days now and it is a gorgeous time. One of love and interest, conversation and taste. We used our tax returns in February to buy the tickets. We made that money the long slow hard way. This city now, it's a magic but a different one. Gray has entered my beard and some regions of my heart. Her and I met in the later throes of our own separate tragedies and have done so well to thrive through em during and since. But Paris now has morbid edges I didn't see six years ago, and yet it is still magic, a passionately intimate one with my lover and also a slow and thoughtful one that requires me to look my self in the face and recognize change. We have no wifi where we are staying, so now I sit at a nearby bistrot scrolling through my instagram feed,noticing how all my old friends are now pregnant and raising kids, where six years ago I used to be one.

oct 20, 2019

how the bright flowered mattress topper from india cheered up our bed

i know i am about to fall asleep when the voices in my head aren't my own. like newscasters being turned up on a dial. fragmenting in and out of the static that is being awake. each night i go to sleep with a little less hope than i used to have but with a little more peace and quiet in my soul because of it. you kids turn off that racket, hope. i can feel the days bleeding into one another like the old folks used to warn. nightly episodes of a re-rerun public broadcasting television show, lo-fi, outdated, tired and inquisitive, aging and living a number of days is like my body is rick steves in europe. speaking of which, we used our tax returns from last year to buy a couple cheap flights back in february. gonna go try to breathe a few new days in october and november.

whose fault its not

any of the jobs that have paid me too little to wear down my feet and knees.

the colleges i never tried to attend but that now in hindsight reek of opportunity.

the people who never answered my query emails.

my mom and dad. i let them off the hook. run. run. before i change my mind.

the famous screenwriter who yelled at me when i was 19 trying to get a read.

the magic of what i felt when i did it and did it well.

indian summer

You and I driving up and down california talking about our moms. In bed with you on an afternoon before our night jobs. Memorizing you. I lay there with your hair sticking to our sweat layered skin, my chest hair rubbed off onto both of us, urging myself to memorize you.

I wake up when you come in at night, feeling completed in time. wait for you to slowly rise in the morning just to hear what you have to say. it's hard prying myself from you to start some days, the world out there doesn't get better than what we have awakened.

It's fun to try. It's fun to go out there and try, to fall on deaf ears, to ignite a few minds, to try. I had this thought about how we work so hard trying to make a living from our art it's important to also think that perhaps making our art might be what's keeping us alive.

I've been in the same timeless dream since I met you. I don't recognize any of it and willingly accept all of it, thirst for this life of ours, all its challenges and strengths and all.

young bitches in wonderland

we were young bitches in wonderland. we walked the walkstreets with squeaky Converse shoes and chests strong to and from the ocean and in between where there was nothing at all. we'd leave bars having drunk out of red tecate cans (or whatever was the cheapest) and if they gave us a pint glass we'd watch the bubbles rise up in the candle light to avert our eyes. many nights we'd run home, even if we were alone we'd run home, cuz being a young and fit couple of young bitches we had extra batteries to spare, even if at the time we felt like the tiredest sons of bitches on the planet

a couple hours north of burlington

I remember the first woman to buy me magnum condoms. She said I needed em. She was only my second partner. She was seven years older than I was. She jokingly called me her pool boy. We both worked at an ice cream shop together in an abandoned railway station. She had liked my arms, the way they looked through my white t-shirt when I swept. She had broken up with her boyfriend a couple weeks after I started. She said her ex-boyfriend wasn't into sex, owned a gun and had anger issues. She said her mom had a one night stand in Turkey while in the military and that was how she came to be conceived. Life hadn't been kind to her but she was still kind back. One of those people who cheers everyone else up and instantly becomes their friend, to make better use of the madness than most of us.

There are kids who get hit and smile. There are kids who get yelled at and yell back. I was neither of them. I still have a body raging inside my chest that churns like an ocean whose tide book I rarely get to read. I do nothing but navigate the underwater energy, quietly, away from people. There, in Vermont, I was still inundated by the borderline visions and leading the rescue team of, the woman who birthed me.

She would buy me a Vitamin water and drive me to her rundown house. She lived in a basement beneath a family I never met. They farmed goats on their property. I never tried the goat milk, never tried the cheese. I would go outside in the summer rain and piss beneath an evergreen. There was a hole there where an animal lived, I always felt vindicated peeing nearby it. It rained all that summer when it wasn't not raining and her bed was a mat on the floor. She eventually got her own apartment above a gas station where her bed on the floor moved to another floor, newspapers covering the windows until she could buy curtains.

I had to end things with her when I did because I was uncomfortable with everything. I didn't want to be there. I didn't want to be the person I was, in the situation I wasn't. I feared getting her pregnant when she begged to try it without the condoms. I just wanted to be a person I was told I had to be, even though no one I ever knew had ever been close to achieving him. Mother, mother, all those crooked Hollywood dreams you whispered into my ears before fleeing across the continent yourself. I have been living their nightmare and counting my moral victories ever since.

It was that Christmas in Vermont when her ex-boyfriend called me at the Victorian house in the center of town and threatened my life. He called me the pool boy, said he'd kill me. Evidently he had read her diary, she had emailed some time later apologizing. I told my mom I had to go back to Los Angeles, to pursue her dreams and to save my life. That, she understood.

I never got to thank the young woman for setting me free, back into the nightmare another person had dreamt up for me. Somewhere along the way it became all mine. Somewhere along the way I can now call my mom and she isn't afraid to tell me that it's not to late to do another thing. But it's mine now, it's all mine.

The other day in Atwater Village, after donating a couple of shrunken in the dryer t-shirts, I grabbed a handful of regular-sized free condoms from the front counter at the Out of the Closet thrift shop. The shop clerk said to take ten, that they were finger toys.

a territorial dwarf

they carved their names into the body of the felled giant. a tunnel carved into its chest for folks to walk through and take pictures of themselves. love is sold to us like holiday cards. holidays weren't invented by the holiday card companies, love was, then the holidays followed.

so what is it there, what was it there when the two of us sat cradled in a spool of emotions projecting onto the screen of a camping tent. a darkness, the light and its resulting nausea, a disorienting space, the faces of upside down strippers working the pole branches with tasseled needles in the lunch buffet trees through the mesh window we had worked so hard to peel the polyester flaps back from. harlots emerging from the shapes in the pine cones to seduce me away from the sober aches. what was it then when the patient trees spun back into their ridiculous gradients and i snapped out of it and them. the way you laughed so hard the tears came and delivered you into full fledged sobs. what was it then.

into the cold creek pool for a cellular baptism, to demarcate the restlessness of passing days and us as aging creations. cut a hole in me, cut a hole in me, i am science i am an experiment in teaching a man to fail and then telling him he can't.

you said people either make it in the big city and stay, or they go back to their towns and have one or two kids. i wandered off, stood tall on a rock that gave way and pounded me down onto the forest floor.

what was it then, when we together ripped the core off ourselves and in an exhausted state, with no glory inside ourselves to speak of, found perfection.

dont forget these are the good days

life in the city is about new money not old death. i stagger slowly out of bed in the morning. a bed on the floor. a strong man feeling his body tire and strengthen, tire and strengthen. a gulp of water. a kiss on her cheek before doing the crossword puzzle on my phone. a kiss on her cheek cuz i can give her millions once she wakes up. which shouldn't be long, what with the bulldozers and cement trucks starting to roar next door.

film/tv project

franklin canyon the 2nd time

she said, josh, "i love you." in her french accent. it was late night on the red bricked stairs outside her front door in beverly hills. she was set to leave to paris for the summer. we were not lovers. she was a beautiful french woman and i watched her two little boys. we'd play basketball, skateboard, soccer, and they'd swear at me like brothers should. it was a job that saved me for awhile, from loneliness and financial ruin. she'd cook us dinners and usually give me more of her ex husband's money at the end of the night than we'd agree upon.

i talk with steve about the homeless epidemic after bumping into each other in the library surrounded by homeless people. i am a few thousand dollars away but i talk about it like an observer. for now i am. he is a working actor who spends his free days weaving in and out of the same places i do, like the library, we are both searching but neither of us knows where to go to find it. somehow he and i became trapped into the same design in this part of town for this time.

i told her i loved her back, and did. she was a wild hearted aunt, a forbidden fruit borne out of our mutual desperation for decency. the rest of the world and our lives could be indecent and so we wouldn't be that way together. a silent agreement that neither of us ever spoke of, no matter the flattery we'd hurl into each other's red cheeks. she had those european cigarettes imported in by a guy she knew, lighter, fragrant, with the grisly photographic warnings plastered on em. at the end of many nights, we'd smoke em and talk about our disappointments, the boys would be asleep, and it would just be us until we'd say goodbye to go be with just ourselves.

tremors

We were on the Malibu Pier eating the best cinnamon roll of our lives when the 4th of July earthquake wobbled the damn thing. The employees ran out and looked over the edge into the water, so we knew it wasn't a usual movement from the waves or anything. I had once read a book about how Survivors are those who recognize danger and don't remain in status quo when things go wrong, if they can help it, so my girlfriend Siobhan told me to grab some to-go boxes and we hurried off to some nearby rocks on the shore to finish our food. 

In one of the boxes we had piled both our plates high into it and in the other was our cinnamon roll. She had woken up that morning wanting a cinnamon roll and there on that pier and then in that box, was their last one. A splendid cinnamon roll. It had, the cinnamon roll, like a salted caramel cream cheese topping and the bun was still warm when we bit back into it on the shore. 

I remember the 1994 Northridge Quake, I was a Southern California kid who'd already experienced a few of them, so as I went flying up and down in my bed, I remembered thinking "I hope I remember to tell my parents about this in the morning" but they came running down the hallway to share the experience right then and there. They were still married running across a long hallway, that long pier where my girlfriend and I now ran, to our cinnamon roll, my parents to their kids. We went outside, my sister had friends sleeping over because of the Monday holiday, all of us in our sleeping shirts standing on the grass staring up at the stars, aftershocks, it feeling foreign and devastating and exciting.

We spent this 4th of July with my friend Morgan and his wife and their new baby and his family on their beach, laying there and bodysurfing, ash from last years' Malibu wildfires drifting among us in snaking clumps of debris atop the green water, a riptide nagging at us here and there, smiling, a bunch of smiling wet faces we all were. I felt happy, I felt disoriented, I felt like a kid who'd just been in an earthquake.

the ex girlfriend who i helped make a millionaire

some time after i'd given her the idea that made her a millionaire but some time before she gave me nothing for it, i had asked my ex girlfriend on the phone about all the devastating places where she had taken photographs for $600 - $1,000 a day. all the red cross tents and shelters, samoa, mississippi, haiti, i had asked her if any of the survivors had ever described the horrible acts of nature that had wiped out the very foundations of their lives, as beautiful. had they ever remarked on the terrible forces of nature as beautiful. and she said no

A Suspension of How Things Often Were

Mama I ain't alone

Mama I quit that whole sad act routine

Mama I found a love that lasted longer than either of us know what to do with

And so, Mama, we just keep doing it

And it feels damn good Mama

I'll try to call you back one of these days too

dang construction

Sitting in my parked car listening to Charles Barkley on the Colin Cowherd sports radio program saying not to worry about what people think of you if you’re rich, talented, or good looking, with $87 worth of groceries in the backseat of my car melting (frozen cherries melting) and feeling very good about the present and my future as 

(we got $5 cash in the mail today to take a survey for USC asking questions like how we do feel about our future prospects?) 

and it got me thinking about my future prospects  

And I told Siobhan to keep the $5 cuz she was the one who opened the envelope and I wouldve thrown it away and - most importantly - 

I felt like I owed her 5 

and then she said she felt like she owed me 5 

and isn’t that part of what love is about right there 

you both feeling like you owe the other one for making each other’s lives at least five dollars better

training day

A man tries to take a picture of himself that will adequately explain him in form and it doesn’t work out so well until he realizes he is indeed blurry. Caught in that blur that all the adults talked about in bewildered tones when he was that thing before a man. 

He takes the trash out after this picture is taken and hears a couple of boys singing along in the apartment below his to Sponge Bob Square Pants while a toddler shrieks after them- a meaningful shriek- this toddler trying to explain himself in a meaningful shriek, all to identifiable to the blurry man. 

What a day. What a set of tired legs. What a way to live a life on a street made famous in crime movies documented from time to time on his ole iphone 6. 

I hope you’re all out there grasping at straws with a big ole smile on your faces

one thing i learned

I’d like to share a trick I taught myself years ago. It’s inevitable that if I am out hiking with my phone or a pen and pad, I will think of nothing important creatively and need them little - however if out on the trails in only my clothes and nothing else, I will be ignited with creative solutions to the project I am working on. Such is the nature of things, an abandon of tools to the solution yields of course to the solution. The worry is that halfway across a trail with a drifting mind, I will forget the very profound breakthrough I had out there. Ask any creative, any human, It’s so easy to forget the very thing that we think we’ll never forget. Today it happened again, I was walking up through Griffith Park in the fog practicing an upcoming television pitch when a perfect phrasing for a section of it arrived. So here is my trick:

I will pick up a tiny rock on the ground whose shape and size, distinctions, appeal to me, and I will anchor the idea into the rock. I will repeat the idea a few times and store the wording into the rock as though its a hard drive. I will then put the rock in my pocket, think of its meaning a few more times and carry on my nature trek. When I arrive to my car, home, etc I will take the rock out and like magic the idea will still be stored into it, anchored. 

I’ve done this successfully with multiple rocks at a time. It rocks.

I wanted to share this trick

low stakes friendships

victor heights

The way our cell phone battery charger cords get all tangled together in our kitchen is one of the many reminders of us coming together under a roof of love in a studio apartment we pay very little for while entwining what it means to be ourselves

the night donny got stoned (and helena saw a ghost)

something i wrote in sep, 2016

Last night I was in a bar bathroom washing my hands and glancing at myself in the mirror. I thought to myself, I am in the prime of my life and in seven minutes my dad will have been dead for one year.

This morning I am driving up the 101 North with a hangover like I did so many times when he was healthy and when he was sick. I am picking up tax stuff from my dad’s best friend and distributing the bits of his final return to siblings.

A year ago today my dad died in my arms. As a psychiatrist for Ventura County, my dad would periodically speak to police officers about non-violent approaches to handling the mentally ill. He said some of the cops would listen, some were dicks. He said they’d warm up to him after he made a couple jokes. He loved that I did stand-up comedy. He would pitch me ideas all the time. Three days after he passed away I went to the Nerdmelt open mic cuz I had no idea where else to go. And it felt better being there. My friends, community, couldn’t have been kinder to me. Comics have the biggest hearts, chaotically so, but gigantic.

My dad died a couple weeks shy of his 75th birthday, a white man’s age to die. I watch videos on the news of young black men losing their lives at ages they shouldn’t. Fathers, sons. I have all kinds of things I want to say but I can’t articulate em, I’m not qualified, I can only support black lives mattering. I see the cell phone footage. I read the media skewing the facts. The transcripts, how they called Philando Castile, “the suspect” as he bled to death. An innocent man in a car. Compared to the atrocities perpetrated against the black community by a corrupt oppressive system, my dad dying of cancer was a luxury for me. And losing my dad to cancer was hell.

There was so much beauty in hell. He waited for me to get there. He was sitting up, who sits themselves up on the side of the bed to die. He was so strong while being quiet about it. We ran to him, held him. I had left the front door open behind me. We sat around his dead body when a hummingbird flew into the house. It circled and then left. We had asked him for a sign. Trav and Britt had asked him to send a bird that night before. All those nights before, camped out as children. All those nights before, camped out as grown ups. He sent us a hummingbird into the house. 

Here is a joke premise cuz my dad wouldn’t want this getting too serious: As he was dying I was getting Tinder matches on my phone. 

A year of mourning. I climbed Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The air was thin. 13,000 feet. It was physically the most difficult challenge I’d given myself. I got to the top, then realized I needed to go higher. I got to the top finally and I cried. My brother Trav did the same thing in Scotland. Climbing mountains and tears. Gratitude. Gratitude for my dad. Gratitude for my family. Gratitude for my friends. Gratitude for my planet. Gratitude for my body, while I have it. 

Us in this big body, a bunch of organs and veins and collections of cells arranging ourselves into something showing all kinds of hints of a creation pointing to a larger creation and it doesn’t have to be Frankenstein we can be constructing something like the love I feel for my dad today cuz this love is not mine this love it belongs to all of us and it is the only building block worth using in our construction.  

and the moon too

even then

I don't remember my mom holding up the blue sky with a garden rake but apparently she did.

I remember opening the gates to you, agony, pleasure, that expansive planet of lust. this morning. i remember it i do. saying i held open the gates while you all the while were the key.

I don't remember when the thickness of youth began to thin and how it required more of the same to create the holy spirit of inspiration, effect.

I remember you walking into that restaurant I was working at behind the bar with sheets of rain and blue gray light backdropping you, how you appeared out of that world like an alien. and i a grieving alien my own. and you a grieving alien your own. and how two aliens with slender fingers touched on each other, poking for gold and it falling out like the coins from my pockets this morning when we moved horizontally. and how this morning you joked about them being sonic the hedgehog coins.

I don't remember the price of that tequila shot, pbr, all you can eat tacos and peanuts special at the gold room. i thought it was 3 bucks but simon said it was 4. i think he was right

I do remember you at the gold room that first night we left work and wandered about echo park like the whole town was a park, a playground of loud angry cars and sad old men at the bar counter who you thought i was giving too much attention to joking about god knows what before i kissed you.

Dreams Dont Diee by le turek brothers

1500 miles

I turned 34 on friday. We went to the Grand Canyon and then our friends wedding in Tucson.

We stayed in Motel 6's and then rented a cool desert casita.

I had a head cold, the altitude descending from Flagstaff made it worse. I had toyed with the idea of dropping acid on my birthday but instead I was hocked up on Sudafed and cough drops.

I dragged around clogged ears, stuffed nose, a sore throat but eyes still wide and a heart still pried open in my chest for another year.

The sight of the Grand Canyon was too much to understand without interacting with it, which we didn't, we didn't hike to its bottom nor sleep on its cliffs, just drove obediently from lookout point to lookout point until the time zone changed but we felt little different.

But you can't talk shit about the Grand Canyon my girlfriend and I joked.

My girlfriend Siobhan she bought me pizza and two different slices of cake for my birthday dinner and was so gentle to me and my congested ass face the whole trip. My treasure. Our 2 year anniversary is in a few days and I've never been with someone so long. I've never loved so easily, and felt love in return the same.

4 days, 34 years of age, Motel 6, 2 years of continuous love. I love numbers and how they let us track the imperceptible, attempt to put order to an orderless time. Time is an insomnia in Williams, Arizona staring at my bright phone in the dark next to my dreaming lover while a stranger snores loudly through the thin walls of our motel room.

On my mom's 62nd birthday a few weeks ago I asked her what she thought it was all about, she said experiences, love and family, that there was no end goal, just to experience as much as we can. I am grateful to be alive. The night before we saw the canyon, my girlfriend and I hurried outside to take photos of ourselves in a flurry of Arizona mountain snow, like happy fools, returning red cheeked into a steak house where we ate a warm apple pie slice a la mode, and melted, everything melted - it wasn't the Sudafed nor the acid I never took, everything was just melting into itself rendering the world, love, illness, health all the same. Two days ago, three days, today, tomorrow, 15 years from now, time flies when you're having fun.

how to be

touch an innocuous door handle and it ignites a flash of memory to another place. I've been in and out and finding so much of it pleasant as hell. A burnt piece of palo santo in a room that's burning down. A Catalonian red wine spilling it's plum mineral blood down a throat.

Climbing steps up to a white adobe house on New Years Eve filled with Arizona people and music made from the neon green hides of broken aliens. Then that hidden fairy land in the corner of Highland Park with a kid telling me to feed the fire with Santa Maria wood while he spun obscure wonders and we danced like muppets.

To wonder what I'm doing here over a bowl of oatmeal in my kitchen and feeling like I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be, the clouds the way they were outlined out our window with perimeters of yellow bounced orange light yelling at me how I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be.

She says she hates waking up cuz it reminds her that one day she won't. I know. I know. Fuck, all our deaths but this is living. Fuck all the lost opportunities we're dying anyway.

I run errands, run mental circles, drive on slick pavement and thunderous potholes and traverse my city cascading with memories through fifteen mostly underpaid years that I wouldn't trade for anything.

A girl in brown high waisted Dickies and tattooed arms hugs her arms around the slight slender 20 something boy she loves before they track past me to go have unprotected sex in a youthful haze.

kemosabe

There was never no oath with the person you didn't want to be with, the person you didn't want to be. There was never no oath to take care of one another if you weren't taking care of one another as you turned into the person you wanted to be. There was never no oath with the person you never wanted to be, that's why you went on to become the person you were trying to be.

A month or so ago

h2o